Migrant children face educational hurdles

They talk about becoming fashion designers and soccer players when they grow up. Teachers, lawyers, nurses.

Jennifer Torres

They talk about becoming fashion designers and soccer players when they grow up. Teachers, lawyers, nurses.

They play tag after school until they are called indoors because it's chilly or because it's time for dinner.

They have crushes.

They call each other names.

And they are part of a vast agricultural infrastructure that means bunches of asparagus and sacks of tomatoes sell for less than $2 a pound.

An estimated 900,000 school-age children live alongside the farm workers who, season to season, plant and pick the seeds and yields of this country's farms, fields and orchards.

California schools educate more than one-third of them.

San Joaquin County alone has registered nearly 11,000 migrant students whose educations are interrupted by their families' limited ability to help with school work, their own need to earn a living or growing seasons that can pull them in and out of the region and in and out of the region's classrooms.

A celebrated few overcome the challenges of language, poverty and transience to finish high school, go to college and emerge with lives no longer bound to the field and its cycle of seasons.

Forty years of advocacy have at least advanced the prospects of the others; millions of dollars in federal grant money help schools identify migrant students, get them academic help and refer them to health care and other services.

Still, for many, an agricultural economy in which work swells and then tapers, and can pay less than $10,000 a year, overcomes the educational adage that promises children they can become fashion designers, soccer players, teachers, lawyers and nurses - anything they want - when they grow up, if only they work hard enough.

If Aime Hernandez had her way, she'd be watching "Rebelde" on television after school or "La Fea Mas Bella." Some telenovela with characters whose perennially fraught lives teeter from the breathlessly dramatic to the deliriously silly.

But in the Hernandez family living room, the Power Rangers have already transfixed 3-year-old Elizabeth. Aime doesn't even try to change the channel. She sits with her baby sister until just after 5, then gets up from the couch to begin her homework.

The 12-year-old has that most coveted of adolescent luxuries: her own bedroom. It's been just hers for a few months, since her big sister Yuribel, a senior at Lodi High School, moved in with her boyfriend.

Now, Aime's walls are decorated with a bandanna from Club America, the soccer team she follows, and pictures that Yuribel left behind, including some from the place in the world that Aime most wants to visit: Monterey Bay.

"I want to see a seal," says Aime, a sixth-grader with long, dark hair pulled into a low ponytail.

Monterey is a car ride less than three hours away. Aime has never been there but hopes to see it someday, maybe on a field trip, like Yuribel did.

For now, she spreads her papers over her bed, takes a pencil from her backpack and begins.

Fifteen years ago, Celia and Celerino Hernandez left Guerrero, Mexico, and came to California.

Celerino Hernandez sums up that better life they sought, that greener pasture worth thousands of miles of travel by truck and on foot: "Three more months."

"In Guerrero," he said outside his home behind a wooden fence in a Lodi alley, "there's only six months of work in the fields."

Here, there are at least nine, usually more.

So here they are. "It was not a difficult decision."

Celia and Celerino brought with them Maria, now 20, Yuribel, now 19, and Miguelina, now 18.

Aime, Elizabeth and 9-year-old Celerino Jr. are citizens of the United States, born at San Joaquin General Hospital.

According to historians, children like the Hernandez siblings - the children of farm laborers - have lived in this country since at least the 1920s.

Not until the 1960s, though, did policymakers develop programs meant to support their education. To be successful in that effort means overcoming poverty, language barriers, frequent absences from school and other challenges that are typical of the migrant lifestyle and that often leave migrant children struggling to learn.

Over the past 40 years, migrant-education programs have worked to help them, offering a range of measures that address health, family life and academics. Such services were developed at a time when educators estimated that roughly one in 10 migrant students graduated high school.

Figures vary, but most estimates pin the current dropout rate among migrants at about 50 percent.

Two of Aime's older sisters, Maria and Miguelina, did not finish school and now are raising their own small children - Miguelina in her parents' home.

Yuribel believes she will graduate from Lodi High at the end of this school year. Afterward, she thinks, she will be a cashier, or maybe work in a restaurant. What she'd most like, though, is to be an interior designer and live in a "big house close to the ocean."

She has never been to such a house, but "I've seen one in this magazine and in books," she said. "And on a Web site. It looks pretty."

Aime hasn't decided for sure yet, but she thinks she would like to be a kindergarten teacher.

Her parents nod when she says so.

In 1960, on the day after Thanksgiving, American television viewers saw the first broadcast of Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame."

The documentary detailed the lives of migrant farm workers in rural Florida who were meagerly paid, exposed to pesticides, left hungry and otherwise living in substandard conditions.

Many researchers credit the broadcast for a subsequent surge in advocacy on behalf of farm workers and their families.

While basic health and housing needs were addressed first, advocates eventually turned their attention to the schooling of farm workers' children.

In 1966, the federal Education Department launched the Migrant Education Program and, the following year, allocated $9 million to support it.

Today, the program accounts for about $386.5 million of the roughly $88.9 billion federal education budget.

Proponents of migrant education consider increased funding an important accomplishment and note other successes. Migrant students have gone on to become teachers, doctors, members of Congress. One from San Joaquin County grew up to be an astronaut.

Yet most migrant children continue to struggle in school and, statistically, are as likely to graduate high school as to drop out before finishing.

Last year, about 40 percent of all second-graders in the county demonstrated grade-level proficiency on their standardized language-arts tests. Among migrant second-graders, only 20 percent did. Among migrants in their sophomore year of high school, that figure slumped to 10 percent.

For the 2006-07 school year, the San Joaquin County Office of Education has about $8.9 million to pay for programs that serve the nearly 18,500 migrant students in San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties.

To be eligible for services, students must be at least 3 years old and not yet 22. One of their parents, their spouse or they themselves must be employed in seasonal agricultural work. And their search for employment must have taken them across school district boundaries at least once within the past three years.

The federal government allows local school systems flexibility in designing specific migrant services. Generally, though, the program aims to "ensure that all migrant students reach challenging academic standards and graduate with a high school diploma (or complete a GED) that prepares them for responsible citizenship, further learning and productive employment," according to the Education Department.

The San Joaquin County Office of Education oversees migrant education in the region, and Elizabeth Hernandez is among its youngest clients.

Since she turned 3 in August, Elizabeth has received an hourlong visit each week from a preschool tutor.

The education office brings preschool to some family homes, figuring that many parents lack both the wherewithal to transport their young children to nursery school and the know-how to prepare them for kindergarten some other way.

Acelina Mier comes to the Hernandez house on Mondays. She brings a rolling cart full of worksheets, picture books, paints, crayons and other school things that keep Elizabeth interested and eager.

In the family's living room, Celia Hernandez watched as Mier taught her ponytailed daughter about triangles, colors, numbers and her name.

Toward the end of the hour, Mier pulled three books from her cart and set them in front of Elizabeth, close to the girl's baggie of Fruit Loops.

"We encourage parents to read all week with them," she said.

Hernandez nods: "Si, Maestra." Yes, Teacher.

But Hernandez doesn't read. Not in English. Not in Spanish. Mier is the one who reads most regularly to Elizabeth.

When Celia needs help, she asks one of her daughters.

The girls also translate for their mother during visits to the doctor or conferences with one of Aime's or Celerino's teachers.

"I didn't really like school," Hernandez said of her own upbringing. "I didn't go."

Neither did her husband.

When he was old enough for school, Celerino Hernandez said, he was old enough to mind goats at the ranch his family lived and worked on.

Now, he said, he tells his children, "I don't want you to work in the fields like I do."

On a recent Wednesday, about an hour after the school bus brought Aime and Celerino Jr. home from Washington Elementary School, Hernandez watched his son scramble into the alley to play tag.

Celia Hernandez called from inside the house, asking if they should put jackets on.

Yuribel had visited briefly, then left with her boyfriend.

Miguelina and her babies rested in their own part of the house, separated from the rest with a bedsheet pinned to a bedroom doorjamb. (Sometimes she wishes she could go back to school, said the 18-year-old who nearly finished ninth grade. "Sometimes not.")

Elizabeth watched TV and then dragged a chair to the kitchen sink, where her mother rinsed dishes.

If they want to finish high school and go to college, Celia Hernandez said, she hopes her children will do that.

It would be one kind of success, said Olivia Sosa-Kropp, San Joaquin County's migrant-education director.

Other examples are smaller, she said. "It's just about providing opportunities."

In Aime's room, just big enough for her dresser and twin-size bed, a bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling. She switched it on, leaned against a pillow and pulled the rough draft of a compare-and-contrast essay from a folder.

Celerino Jr. does his homework in the living room, but with the television on, Aime said, "I can't concentrate."

Aime's essay was about Yuribel and her best friend, Jessica. "They're both nice," she said and tapped her pencil against her lips. "They both help me with my homework when I don't understand."